CONCluSION • 241“Irrespective of Race and Religion”: A New
Discourse of Difference in the Global SphereIf, despite their persistent presence, the language and categories of
race and religion were less pronounced during the British Mandate
than under the Ottomans, the official terms of the mandate likely
played a key role in this process. The League of Nations famously
incorporated the Balfour Declaration into the preamble of its 1922
Mandate for Palestine, condemning the British (apparently on their
own insistence and against the objections of other league members^21 )
to follow through on their dual commitments to promote “the estab-
lishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” while
somehow also doing nothing “which might prejudice the civil and
religious rights of existing non- Jewish communities in Palestine.”
Article 2 of the Palestine Mandate restates the Balfour commitment in
new and highly revealing terms:
The Mandatory [i.e., the British] shall be responsible for placing
the country under such political, administrative, and economic
conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national
home, as laid down in the preamble, and the development of self-
governing institutions, and also for safeguarding the civil and re-
ligious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race
and religion.^22Whereas in the Balfour Declaration, Palestine’s Muslim and Christian
Arabs were referred to as “existing non- Jewish communities,” half a de-
cade later, in 1922, they were now regarded as “inhabitants” (though
the categories of rights they could expect to be safeguarded remained
the same, still ambiguous “civil and religious”). For our purposes, how-
ever, the more significant and consequential change from Balfour’s
language was the addition of the phrase “irrespective of race and reli-
gion.” The league of Nations demanded that there be no discrimina-
tion in civil and religious rights on the basis of the categories of race
and religion, those very categories that I have highlighted throughout
this book.^23
(^21) See Pedersen, “The Impact of league Oversight on British Policy in Palestine,” 42.
(^22) Article 2, League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, 1922.
(^23) It is worth noting that in the White Paper issued in 1922 by the British just before
the official ratification of the mandate by the league of the Nations, Colonial Secretary
Winston Churchill explained that by “the development of the Jewish National Home in
Palestine,” the Balfour Declaration meant “the further development of the existing Jew-
ish community, with the assistance of Jews in other parts of the world, in order that it
may become “a centre in which the Jewish people as a whole may take, on the grounds